Ouija: Origin of Evil review – prequel keeps spirits high with schlocky scares

Ouija, 2014’s rapidly forgotten exercise in crash-bang-wallop horror, was chiefly notable as a business proposition, born of a deal struck between Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes outfit and boardgame nabobs Hasbro to convert the latter’s products into movies. Still, it was cheap enough to turn a profit on wide release – $103m (£84m) on a $5m budget – and so, this Halloween, we’re offered a prequel that claims to fill in some of the devil board’s backstory. “The spirit world is unpredictable,” its phoney occultist heroine Madame Zander (Elizabeth Reaser) informs us. The movie business, as we know very well, is not.

For all that, Origin of Evil – directed by Mike Flanagan, the emergent talent behind 2011’s unsettling Absentia – does just enough to climb over the low bar of expectation. Granted, there’s nothing new about its premise – fake psychic learns a lesson about messing with the dark side – and Flanagan has to resort to a 1960s milieu, all kinky boots and intermittent “groovy”s, to distinguish his film from the 1970s-set Conjuring series.

The story unfolds when single mom Zander seizes upon the titular toy to jazz up her seance act; what she doesn’t expect is for her youngest, Doris (Lulu Wilson), to become an altogether amenable host for passing spectres.

Flanagan’s been sent on the movieland equivalent of a coffee run here, so you can forgive him for amusing himself as he goes: dusting off the old Universal logo, reviving those cigarette burns used to alert projectionists to reel changes. If nothing quite matches Ti West’s retro exercises (The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers), at least Flanagan’s trying. Yes, he works his soundtrack over, but with co-writer Jeff Howard he sets so much weird narrative running – mom’s thwarted relationship with a priest, unresolved paternity issues, Doris’s overnight grasp of Polish – that he doesn’t have to rely on loud noises to grab the attention.

Arguably he’s caught trying too hard. The final movement doesn’t tie matters up so much as spiral outwards into schlocky incoherence. Still, the formula is upended somewhat: this time, the Ouija board itself is a minor player, less a piece of obligatory product placement than a springboard for ideas, be it wayward or workable. It’s still no scarier than any branded content, and perhaps only the most lukewarm slumber party would truly need it. Yet if you were to ask whether Origin of Evil offers a better quality of timewasting than its predecessor, my finger would hover inexorably over YES.